Emails to customers

Customers have no account. Everything they know about their order arrives by email, so the sequence is worth knowing by heart: it is what they will ring about. A customer with no email address on their record gets none of these, quietly, and the office tells them on the phone instead.

Every one is sent from Bottle in the business’s name, and replies go to the business where a reply address is set under Settings › Business.

1. We have your order

Sent the moment an order is taken in the office, for an order paid on account or by cash on delivery. What they ordered, the days to expect, how it is being paid, and their tracking reference in a box of its own, with a button to the tracking page. The reference is the point: everything after this hangs off it.

An order paid by link does not get this. See the next two.

2. How to pay

For an order paid by link, sent the moment the order is taken. One amount, including VAT, and one button to a Stripe page on the business’s own account. No reference yet: nothing is promised until the money is in. Send the link again on the order sends a fresh one to chase.

3. Paid, thank you

Sent the moment a pay-first order is paid, whether Stripe says so or the office marks it paid by hand. The same content as We have your order, with the reference. Sent once, however many times Stripe repeats itself.

Stripe emails its own receipt for the card payment, from the business’s name. The invoice itself is Bottle’s, raised when the link was sent and numbered in the business’s own sequence. See Invoices.

4. On its way

The morning the van leaves, everybody on the round is told their two-hour window, in a box at the top, then what is on the van, then Not going to be in? Tell us where to leave it, which opens the tracking page. Sent once per drop: a driver pressing I have set off twice tells nobody twice.

5. Not today, sorry

Only when a drop is taken off the round because the driver will not make it in time. Apologises and names the new day. Nothing is sent for a door that could not be delivered for another reason: the office decides what happens next, and says so itself.

6. Delivered

When the drop is written up: what arrived, what is still to come if only part of it went, and the signature or the photograph of where it was left, in the message itself. Nothing is sent for a drop that was not made.

7. Your invoice

Only for customers with an invoicing cycle set. Sent when their period ends: the gas delivered on account in that period, rent on the cylinders they held and for how long, any deposits coming back, the total with VAT, the due date, and whichever ways to pay the business offers, a card button and bank details. See Invoices.

What is never sent

No marketing, no “rate your delivery”, no reminders. A customer who has paid and been delivered hears nothing more until they order again.

The email log

Email log, in the account menu, lists every email Bottle has sent for your business in the last year: invoices, reminders, payment links, delivery updates, and invitations to your team. Search by address or subject, or show only the ones that failed. Open one to read it exactly as the recipient saw it, or as plain text; attachments are named, and the invoice itself can be opened again from the invoice.

A failed email is one the mail server refused. Bottle tries it again on its own, and each attempt is listed. Emails about someone’s own account, such as password resets, are not kept here.

Owners and admins can see it. Entries are removed after a year, since they hold customers’ details.